Gut check: If you sent a new auditor your standard operating procedures (SOPs), would that match what your farm employees do?
Audits are an important tool on the farm that can help provide assurance to farm owners and consumers that farms are operating to their highest potential with animal wellbeing and food safety top of mind. However, audits without a rock-solid standard foundation just create chaos and unhappiness among employees on the farm, Clayton Johnson, DVM, said at the Carthage Swine Conference.
“There are 1,000 different ways to skin a cat. We all have our bias or reference on what’s the best, but make sure the auditor is very clear on what your farm’s rules are. An auditor can create a lot of chaos by coming to your farm and telling your farm they are not doing something right. Now, it may be true that your employees aren’t doing something right,” Johnson says. “But if the auditor just has a different perception of what should be done, the audit is going to be worth nothing to you.”
Having consistent methodology results in efficiency. Auditors won’t be able to look at everything but make sure they look at the most important things.
“We have no excuse with technology, pictures and videos available to show what needs to be done on the farm. If a photo is worth 1,000 words, then a video is worth 1,000 photos. We need to have different communication mechanisms to share what we expect,” he explains.
Here are four auditing keys to success.
1. SOPs should be the foundation of the audit.
First of all, your farm needs to have a point of reference, Johnson says. There must be one version of the truth – whether you call it standard operating procedures (SOPs) or best management practices and protocols – there has to be one version of truth or reference.
“We need to clearly set expectations. What are we auditing to? What do we want? Clear SOPs are necessary before you ever do any audit and that’s true whether you’re talking about finishing audit, a feed mill audit or a truck wash audit,” Johnson adds.
2. Consistent audit methodology drives fastest improvement.
Consistent audit methodology is key. There is never enough time on the farm, so you must prioritize where to spend your time.
“When you consider daily operations on a farm, there’s only certain times a day when work should get done. Auditors need to be there when employees are doing the tasks,” he says. “It’s really important that you have a consistent audit methodology that allows you to efficiently move through the areas you’ve identified based on your audit.”
3. Critical observation skills are essential to getting to root cause.
Good observation skills are extremely important. And that is tougher than you might think, Johnson says. You must stay focused so you can make critical observations.
“That’s probably the hardest thing for me on a farm is to stay focused so I can be observant. Everyone wants to chat with you. I get to see people I really like and only get to see once every month or once every three months. There are a lot of distractions,” he says.
4. An audit is just paperwork without prioritization, training and follow-up.
Farm staff are engaged during the audit, but they have stuff to do when the auditor leaves, Johnson points out. So, follow up. Reach out with a text message, phone call, email, or whatever “speaks” their language. If you don’t follow up, there’s probably not going to be a lot of action.
Johnson encourages farms to adopt the “Plan, Do, Check and Act” philosophy.
• Plan: Determine goals for a process and needed changes to achieve them.
• Do: Execute the plan and implement the changes. This is generally where the audit starts.
• Check: Evaluate the results in terms of performance. There are two goals with the check: Are we executing the SOP in the way we want to execute? And if not, how can we help make that happen? The other is the feedback. Are we getting the improvements we’re supposed to?
• Act: Standardize and stabilize the change or begin the cycle again, depending on the results.
Don’t underestimate the importance of metrics on the farm. The audit tells a farm if they are executing the plan and the metrics tell us what we need to do better, Johnson adds.
“Going to the farm and making a list doesn’t make the farm better,” he says. “It’s the execution of the things on the list.”
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